Georgia: Disaster looms for the West while it Watches the East

If the nation is destroyed and people’s homes are wiped out, then where can one flee for safety? If you care anything about your personal security, you should first of all pray for order and tranquillity throughout the four quarters of the land, should you not? – Nichiren Daishonin / On Establishing the Correct Teaching for the Peace of the Land – WND1, page 24

In a previous post here I warned about the impending chaos in Georgia.  Now the walls are shaking, the ground is trembling and the people are quaking under the onslaught of modern weaponry from both sides.

So is it about tanks and guns and independence and freedom?  Possibly.

How will it affect the West, and thus the rest of the world?

Two tanks burn after being hit in the fierce fighting in the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia, where Georgian troops have been attempting to regain control from rebels.

In this Times article,  they say,

More than a thousand civilians were reported to have been killed and large parts of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, were reduced to ruins as a conflict with potentially global repercussions erupted after months of rising tension (…)  Georgia has said that it was withdrawing half of its 2,000 troops from Iraq as it ordered an all-out military mobilisation.

The country is the West’s strongest ally in the region (…) and a vital conduit for Western oil and gas supplies from Central Asia.(my emphasis)

This pipeline is one of many running through the area.

The fact that an increasingly belligerent Russia, striving to prove itself as a major power again after a decade or so in the doldrums, may control the taps on the pipelines supplying the West, isn’t the immediate problem.

The fact that supplies can be interrupted at any moment is the problem.

Because when a major source of energy is broken, prices increase to reflect the reduced supply.

So the West and the rest of the World, China, India, Japan etc will all have to argue and pay more for their fuel.

This could be the trigger the economists have been waiting for to tip the world into a depression.

And we are all captivated, looking East at the Olympics, while an ethnic, political and economic crisis with potential effects much worse than those in Kosovo, Ruanda or Sudan, develops like an infected boil on the back of the neck of a beautiful woman.

Bizarrely, for China and America who have been so worried about who’s thunder might drown out the other’s trumpeting over the last few months, may find that this conflict might escalate to overshadow the human rights abuses of both countries or the self-publicity machine that is the Olympics.

The Olympics might just become a side show on a much wider stage.  Which would be sad.

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